Tulane University, Dept. Earth & Environmental Sciences

Natural Disasters

EENS 3050  & EENS 6050

Fall 2012

Prof. Stephen A. Nelson
snelson@tulane.edu

Course Description

An examination of the causes, effects, and options available to mitigate natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, landslides, subsidence, flooding, severe weather, and meteorite impacts.

Course Announcements

Syllabus 3050

Syllabus 6050

December 14, 2012 - Final Exam scores and course grades have been posted on Blackboard (My Tulane).   Let me know if there are any problems with Blackboard.

What truly is amazing is that many of the comments below are the same comments I posted after the previous semester's final exam and have been posted on this site during the entire semester. 

If you want to see your final exam or have any questions about your scores or grades, please feel free to come by my office, Room 208 Blessey Hall, or you can send e-mail. 

Here are some general comments on the exam:

Two primary goals that I have in this course is to provide information that will help save your lives and to bust myths people have about historic events or the way things operate. 

• Some general advice - when a professor explicitly tells you that certain questions are going to be on an exam, it is always in your best interest to believe that professor and take actions so that you do not miss those questions when they actually do show up on the exam.
  

• 3 people still think that the levee breaches that occurred in New Orleans during the Katrina event all happened the day after Katrina made landfall.  This is absolutely false.   All levee breaches occurred on the same day that Katrina made landfall (August 29, 2005). 
  
  
• 13% of the class still thinks that New Orleans flooded because the Mississippi River Levees failed.  All levees that failed in New Orleans were on human made navigation and drainage canals. 
   
• 10% of the class still think that magmas come from the liquid outer core of the Earth.  THEY DO NOT!
   
• 27% of the class needs to go back to kindergarten and learn your alphabet. The last time I checked, the letter I was still the ninth letter in the alphabet.  Tropical Storms and Hurricanes are always named alphabetically, thus Isaac was the ninth storm of this Hurricane season, not the 5th.
  
  
• Many of you still think that the amount of damage that an earthquake causes depends on the time of day.  The amount of casualties certainly does, but the damage will be the same no matter when the earthquake occurs.
  
  
• Although large earthquakes in China and floods in Bangladesh usually result in a large number of casualties, an impact with a large space object (> 1 km) would result in many more casualties and is thus the worst possible disaster we discussed in the course.
  
  
• Although Carbon Dioxide gas is the greenhouse gas that is causing global warning, water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
  
  
• New Orleans does not have anywhere near a 40% chance of getting hit by a Category 5 hurricane in any given year. 
  
  
• The best evidence that global warming is occurring is that average global temperatures have increased over the last 150 years. 
  
  
• Earthquakes cannot be predicted.  Thus, there are currently no precursor events that would enable a warning for an earthquake as 4 of you still believe.
  
  
  

Life or Death Questions

Several questions on the final exam were designed to see if you learned some valuable life or death lessons.

• There were no deaths from tsunami, wherein a person did something other than run up the hill when they saw the ocean retreat way off the coast. Thankfully you all survived the tsunami.
  
  
• Only 1 death from the Category 4 Hurricane that resulted from staying in their beach house when the storm came ashore.
  
  
• No deaths that resulted from opening windows in the house during a hurricane under the false assumption that it would relieve pressure, but instead resulted in furniture crashing into heads.
  
  
• 6 of you died from getting struck by lighting by running out in an open field to protect themselves from lightning.
   
• 1 person died in a tornado for failing to go into an interior room on the first floor of the house. 
  
  

Hopefully those of you who potentially died in these situations will read about your errors here before reality strikes. 

October 24, 2012 - I have graded the midterm exam and will pass it back in class on Thursday.  To see some general comments on the exam and to see how you did in relation to the rest of the class, click HERE.

September 6, 2012 - I have revised the schedule in the syllabus to reflect the delay of the start of classes. The new version can be obtained in the Course Documents section of Blackboard or by clicking the syllabus link above.

I have also posted the first set of PowerPoint lecture slides (in PDF format) in the course documents section of Blackboard.

Just a reminder - if you haven't signed up for a field trip, be sure to do so as soon as you can.

September 3, 2012 - Now that we have survived Hurricane Isaac, I am looking forward to seeing you all in class on Tuesday, Sept. 4th.  Hopefully your power has been restored, your internet connection is now working, and you were not affected in any great way by the storm.  If you did suffer adverse consequences, you have my sympathy and support for getting your life back on track.

Note that I have not yet revised the schedule in the course syllabus to reflect the days we missed due to Isaac. For now, just assume that we will follow the same order.  Eventually Tulane will inform us about how we will make up the lost days.  As soon as that announcement is made, I will revise the syllabus.  On the first day of class our first discussion will be about Hurricane Isaac, followed by an introduction to the course and our first lecture topic. 

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Lecture Notes

Note:  Two versions of each set of lecture notes are shown in the table below.  The first is in html format, optimized for viewing on the Web.  You can print this version directly from your Web browser, but there is no guarantee that the pages will break where they are supposed to, since each person's browser can be set up differently (margins, fonts, font sizes, etc.).  

The PDF (Portable Document Format) versions of the lecture notes are optimized for printing.  All page breaks should occur correctly.  If your web browser has the proper plug-in installed, clicking on the PDF will bring the file into your web browser from which you can then print the notes.  If the plug-ins are not installed, your web browser will either attempt to download the PDF files or offer to send you to the Adobe web site to download the plug-ins for your browser.  If you choose to download the PDF format lecture notes you will still need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print the files.  This and further information about the browser plug-ins can be obtained by clicking on the icon below.

Special Note to Firefox and Safari users -  Firefox and Safari web browsers use a different method to display the Windows Symbol font which I used for creating Greek Characters like - D S a b etc. If these characters do not show up as Greek characters, your browser has this problem.   The alternative is to use Internet Explorer to view the html files or to use the PDF files where all fonts are rendered correctly.

 Natural Disasters & Assessing Hazards and Risk*

PDF File*

Earth Structure, Materials, Systems, and Cycles*

PDF File*

Earthquakes: Causes and Measurements*

PDF File*

Earthquake Hazards & Risks*

PDF File*

Earthquake Prediction, Control, & Mitigation*

PDF File*

Earthquake Case Histories*

PDF File*

Tsunami*

PDF File*

Volcanoes, Magma, and Volcanic Eruptions*

PDF File*

Volcanic Landforms, Volcanoes & Plate Tectonics*

PDF File*

Volcanic Hazards, & Predicting Eruption*

PDF File*

Volcanic Case Histories*

PDF File*

Mass Movements*

PDF File*

Slope Stability, Triggering Events, Prediction, & Mitigation*

PDF File*

Subsidence*

PDF File*

The Ocean-Atmosphere System*

PDF File*

River Systems & Causes of Flooding *

PDF File*

River Flooding*

PDF File*

Flooding Hazards, Prediction & Human Intervention*

PDF File*

Coastal Zones*

PDF File*

Tornadoes & Other Severe Weather*

PDF File*

Tropical Cyclones*

PDF File*

Meteorites, Impacts, and Mass Extinction

PDF File

References to works cited in Lecture Notes

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Homework Exercises

Note: Both HTML and PDF files are available from the list below.

Note: Only files with an asterisk (*) have been updated for the Fall 2012 Term.

I. Disaster Info on the Internet* - Due Sept. 13

PDF File*

PDF File*

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PDF File*

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Plate Tectonics

• USGS: This Dynamic Earth

Natural Disasters in General

• Yahoo Disasters Page
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado
• USGS Hazards Page

Earthquakes

• USGS Earthquake Information
• FEMA Earthquake Pages
• New Madrid Seismic Zone Information Pages
• Univ. Nevada Reno- About Earthquakes Page
• Earthquake Engineering Research Institute

Volcanic Eruptions

• MTU Volcanoes Page
• The Electronic Volcano
• Volcano World
• Cascades Volcano Observatory

Tsunami

• Univ. Washington Tsunami Information

Landslides

• USGS National Landslide Information Center
• Landslide videos on the internet
  
  

Floods

• PBS - NOVA Flood Page
• Dartmouth Flood Observatory
• Floodplain Management Web Site

Weather Related Disasters

• National Hurricane Center
• Times Picayune Series on Hurricanes - "Washing Away" 
• USA Today Tornado Page

 Meteorite Impacts

• Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards
• The Chesapeake Bay Bolide
• Terrestrial Impact Structures
  
• Purdue University Impact Calculator

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